Category: Culture

I have made a start on my reading of the shortlist for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2020.

So first out of the blocks is a book published by Granta Publications Jenny Offill’s Weather.

This is not a lengthy book, coming in at around 200 pages. Offill plays with technique, but not in a mad way that makes you never want to go to Newburyport or see another duck as long as you live. Nevertheless there is a certain experimentalism in the presentation of the prose in separated paragraphs throughout.

I love this – that you can breathe in between. Sometimes there is a separate thought or action in the new paragraph and sometimes there is not. But there is nothing disjointed or irritating about the work which I felt flowed very well. If this is stream of consciousness then it is the sort that I can happily live with!

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It immediately put me in mind of the work of poet and sometime genius Ocean Vuong who has popped up with an endorsement on the cover. ‘This is so good,’ states Vuong, ‘we are not ready nor worthy.’

I’m not sure if I feel unworthy or unready for Offill’s work but I sort of see where the comment is coming from. This book is indeed very good and I feel I want to read it again.

So the blurb on the fly leaf posits this work as being about a lady called Lizzie Benson working as a librarian – without a traditional degree (shock, horror). She has supported for years her Mother and recovering addict brother. Lizzie takes on a project to answer mail for a podcast host/philosopher and lecturer called Sylvia who gets too much mail and who throughout the book seems to withdraw further and further into silence.

And although the book does do these things, the blurb fails to mention entirely that Lizzie is primary carer for her son Eli and that she is happily married to Ben, that she acquires a sister in law and a niece along the way. So in common with most women she spends her days juggling multiple responsibilities alongside her paid work. Her brother Henry requires a huge amount of support – particularly when he is rather unsuitably left in charge of a newborn baby – time and effort which Lizzie, in saintly fashion, never begrudges.

But the narrative of events takes second place against a background of 21st century hysteria and incipient climate crisis:

“Eli is at the kitchen table, trying all his markers one by one to see which still work. Ben brings him a bowl of water so he can dip them in to test. According to the current trajectory, New York City will begin to experience dramatic, life altering temperatures by 2047.”

Someone should write a history of snow while we still know what it looks like.

Weather must have been written pre-Corvid but it is an ideal and timely read for this crisis. Offill’s writing defies both categorisation and bland description. I recommend reading it to find out what it does. It certainly deserves its place on the short-list. Will it win? It is so very different in scope and tone from some of the others on the list – at least the ones that I have so far read – and yet the role of a novel is to describe to people the times they are living through so that they recognise themselves in the story, or the times their ancestors lived through, or the times we might live through in the future. And all the shortlisted books do this.

I feel Weather crumbles a bit at the end but that is no doubt deliberate because society will crumble a bit at the end

I do hope to have a punt at the winner before an announcement is made, but it is too early to say if I will choose Weather.

It’s not often I rant on this blog. But there are a number of things I feel very strongly about: income inequality for instance, surveillance, online giants who put bookshops out of business – oh and punctuation!

I am not talking about ‘correct’ punctuation or the efficacy of semi-colons or full stops or commas or apostrophes. But there are a few books around at the moment that see no reason to use any, ever. Either that or they bombard you with legions and legions of commas and little else. Lucy Ellman’s book Ducks, Newburyport is an example. ( Galley Beggar Press. )

The fact that this book contains 1020 pages broken down into a mere 8 sentences, the fact that according to the Guardian review you eventually stop noticing the fact that, the fact that may or may not be true, the fact that I never got to the point where I could find out whether that was a fact or not, the fact that the book won awards and was shortlisted for the Booker prize, the fact that it still drives me absolutely bonkers.

My patient and much admired reviewer above said:

“There were a few dark moments while working my way through Ducks, Newburyport, where death seemed positively appealing as I was faced with another page of dense type…”

This I can understand.

Our poor brains derive meaning not just from one word to the next – but range back and forth across paragraphs, pages or chapters, across clauses and sub-clauses because our poor brains need to take a break sometimes, or mine does. Punctuation, like life, is an opportunity to breathe. Punctuation is like the rests in a musical notation or rhthym. Punctuation is the give-me-a-break friend of the sentence, our saviour from massive indigestible and exhausting tons of words piled unceasingly one after the other across 1020 pages.

Yes its true our minds produce things in bits: ideas, dreams, scraps of proposed speech, memories, anger, to-do lists. Our thoughts dart from one thing to another. That was how stream of consciousness started and how Virginia Woolf used it. But not many people can do what Virginia Woolf did. And how interesting are the contents of my mind – or anyone else’s – if there are thousands of reams of stuff put down in no particular order?

Aye but here’s the rub. Because of course in books there is an order so why pretend there is not? For all its technical in-your-face-ery Ducks, Newburyport is still a story about a woman in Ohio looking back across her life. And oh boy can this lady look back.

Ducks’ author Lucy Ellman is the daughter of James Joyce according to my much admired Guardian reviewer, and therefore I do not get into a discussion about what should or should not constitute stream of consciousness because I really do not know. I only know what I find manageably readable. I only know when writerly technique rams itself into your face about an inch away and stays there staring at you with bloodshot eyes going “nah-nah-nah-nah-nah” for 1000 pages it’s time to close the book and your eyes in sheer exhaustion.

***

From the same publisher comes Toby Litt’s Patience. This is certainly not anything like 1000 pages long nor is it comprised of one sentence. Here – oh joy, one may find such luxuries as full stops and paragraphs although now I look again not very many commas. Hardly any in fact. OK. None.

I worry slightly that this stream of consciousness thing is catching.

Litt’s story concerns itself with a young boy who suffers from cerebral palsy. He lives in an orphanage run by nuns. The date is 1979.

There are many things to love about this book. Not least the poignant way even well meaning human beings treat the disabled. We have access to the narrator Elliott’s interior rebellion which his disability renders impossible to action. But when a new boy Jim comes to the ward, the rebellion is definitely on!

Elliott’s age is not given. He measures his life in Christmas Cards from his family at the beginning of the book which itself a bit of tear jerker and then later on he measures his life in days after Jim’s arrival.

Elliott has been unable to engage with any traditional education but has spent a large amount of time listening to the radio and taught himself, particularly about music. He has very cogent and philosophical thoughts some of which are about the nature of god, guilt and Jesus.

“Creation must be forgiveness or else God is not God but Jehovah Jesus is not Jesus by the Thief and the Holy Spirit is not Holy but Hollow and is not a Spirit but a Sprite full of Spite and full of Holes and thus was I angry that afternoon at the Sisters and especially Sister Britta for making a guiltless boy pray to a guilty God or a God who did not exist making him pray for forgiveness for a sin that never existed except in the guilty head of a Sister.”

If you feel out of breath after reading the above quote, the whole book is like this but at least it feels to be like there is some internal logic to this idea. Elliot cannot speak so the whole book is one long thought. But Litt, unlike his stable mate Ellman, writes sentences that we know will end sometime although in opposition to Ducks, Patience takes out most of the commas, it is at least possible to tune in to a natural rhythm in these sentences.

Elliott befriends Jim, a new boy on the ward. Jim is not pliable. He persists in defiance. Taking up a position by a wooden gate between the ward and the lift, between the ward and the exit and freedom and the normal lived world that is inaccessible to these children. But to stand thus is very much Against the Rules. Jim is not allowed to stand by the wooden gate and he knows this. But he challenges the authority of the nuns by doing so.

I liked the wooden gate. It was a brilliant metaphor for the shut away-ness of lives that are seen as other, as less.

… from climate change to mushrooms to drone warfare, Vesper Flights is the new book by Helen Macdonald ( of H is for Hawk fame). It’s been a long wait since 2014. In that earlier award winning book the author wrote an account of how in the midst of grieving for her father, she struggled to train a Goshawk – named Mabel.

As a naturalist, Macdonald’s work ranges widely across different species and ecologies. As a writer she always finds the perfect analogy between whatever is happening out there in the natural world and what is also happening to the rest of us. Needless to say at a time of global crisis that we are going through now, our relationship to nature seems even more confused and tormented.

Macdonald’s work epitomises the new nature writing. I believe very few people can combine the passion and lyricism of superb writing with deep scientific knowledge born a lifetime of study, the way she does.

There are things we know about birds and there are still even more things we don’t. Although it lacks some of the focus on narrative of her earlier book, Vesper Flights ranges across the myriad topics on which the author is knowledgeable. The way we view birds and animals, the way we talk about them, name them, label them, treat them, ignore them, and often kill them either intentionally or not, comes back in the end Macdonald writes, to the culture we inhabit and how we view ourselves.

Birdwatching, hours and hours spent watching with the naked eye or through field glasses has been a hobby, a habit, an obsession, a career of us humans for as long as there have been birds and eyes or field glasses through which to view them. For beings that don’t talk, they connect to us and we to them. They connect us to each other and to our history.

Macdonald writes:

“… I remember a British officer called Peter Conder who spent the Second World War in prison camps in Germany. He survived by watching birds. Goldfinches. Wrynecks. Migrating crows picking through the waste spread on the frozen fields. Hours and days and years on end. When he came home he didn’t talk. He stayed with his sister and stared out of the window at London starlings roosting in long lines on ledges of Portland stone.”

He observed that the birds always stood a certain distance apart but close enough to deliver a rebuke to his neighbour. He christened it the principle of pecking distance.

And before that around the time of the First World War, a man called Henry Eliot Howard decided that birds held territories too. That males sang to other males as warnings. That brightly coloured plumage was warning. The naturalist Peter Scott noted from the deck of a naval destroyer on which he was serving that somehow the mallards and teal in the reed beds of Slapton Sands were what he was fighting to protect. “That somehow they were England.”

And somehow the birds are still England, enervated, etiolated, disappearing, besieged by wrong headed ideologies.

It has happened before, Macondald writes. As ideologies and systems collapse we “seek ourselves in the mirror of the countryside” See nature as refuge.

But nature is more often encountered on TV and video than in living reality these days, or through nature reserves’ – living museums of flora and fauna which once covered the land.

***

Many thousands of animals and birds – swans, sea turtles even bears and whales – are tagged and tracked every year, in our efforts to understand migration patterns and understand the dangers they face.

“The particulate beauty of unimagined hordes of lives that aren’t our own, tracked minute by minute across the sky and rising out of mystery.”

We survey our remaining birds as we ourselves are under surveillance. But often the biggest danger that they face is us. We congratulate ourselves on our ability to watch the progress of thousands of tagged birds on the internet (a cuckoo named David is reported as reaching home in Wales safely) yet are powerless to intervene to save any that meet difficulties.

That sense of powerlessness is playing out all across the globe as we face as invisible virus and our paranoia increases to the extent that a stork can be captured and arrested on suspicion of carrying an electronic spying device! Technological dominance is reaching out gory tentacles to encompass the design of and the intentional imitation of birds and insects in drone warfare. Poignant avatars, as Macdonald describes these avian victims, for human fears and conflicts.

The birds are caught in the middle. But now, humans are caught in the middle too of things which are completely beyond our understand and control. The twin dangers of Corvid 19 and climate change.

“Summer storms conjure distance and time but conjure too all the things that come towards us over which we have no control. Such storms have their place in literature, the heavy air and mood of suppressed emotion as the storm brews so often standing for an inevitable catastrophe.

And I can’t help but think this is the weather we are all now made of. All of us waiting. Waiting for news. Waiting for Brexit to hit us. Waiting for the next revelation about the Trump administration. Waiting for hope, stranded in that strange light that stills our hearts before the storm of history.”

***

Thank you to #NetGalley and #Grove Press (New York) for this review copy. All views are my own.

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